Mike Aponte of Union Beach stands in the living room of his destroyed home, which was flooded and contaminated with heating oil during Sandy. / DOUG HOOD/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Collin Aponte, 5, of Union Beach looks at what remains of his family's house, while sitting in the trailer they now call home. / DOUG HOOD/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Jim Azaceta of Rumson watches as workers raise his South Ward Avenue home 8 feet after the house was flood-damaged during Sandy. TANYA BREEN/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

More

ADVERTISEMENT

After staying with relatives and family friends, then living in a hotel for a month before moving to a temporary rental, 5-year-old Collin Aponte’s post-Sandy odyssey has come to an abrupt halt — 15 feet from his Union Beach home.

Watch the video above to hear Jim and Theresa Azaceta discuss the work they’ve done in their home.

For the past two months, Collin and his family have been living in a leased 38-foot-long travel trailer parked in their driveway. From the trailer’s kitchen, Collin can look across at the house’s darkened windows, remembering his old bedroom and the nightmarish Oct. 29 storm that swept away the monster trucks he got for his birthday only the day before.

The family’s protracted camping trip isn’t likely to end anytime soon. The holdup: hundreds of gallons of heating oil from ruptured tanks in the area that seeped into their house. The fumes were so toxic that night, Collin and his parents and 12-year-old brother were forced to ride out the howling rain and wind with the windows wide open. From inside the trailer, they can still smell the oil.

Until the contaminated soil is removed, the family can’t rebuild or replace their three-bedroom home. Yet neither their insurance company nor the Federal Emergency Management Agency will pay for the remediation, they say.

“I feel like every day is Groundhog's Day,” said Collin’s mother, Andrea Kassimatis, a 35-year-old pediatric nurse. “It’s Oct. 30th every day, because I feel like we haven’t made any progress.”

Six months after superstorm Sandy, many residents and businesses across New Jersey still find themselves in a state of suspended animation, for myriad reasons.

Some are locked in intractable disputes with their insurers, or are still searching for rental housing, longing to unpack their bags. Many homeowners eager to rebuild their houses are stymied by sweeping new advisory flood elevation requirements, which won’t be finalized until 2014.

Should they raise their homes, and if so, how high? Will they be able to afford to rebuild, or will they have to sell, or simply walk away?

(Page 2 of 4)

For many people, including Collin’s family, not knowing the answers to such pivotal questions is compounding Sandy’s punishing toll.

'A time to build'

To be sure, the past six months has brought meaningful progress along New Jersey’s long road to recovery.

Sandy’s epic storm surge turned large swaths of the Garden State into unsightly garbage dumps. An army of cleanup crews hauled away more than 8 million cubic yards of storm debris, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection — the equivalent of more than 3 million trips to the dump in a full-sized pickup truck.

Meanwhile, insurance companies handling claims to the National Flood Insurance Program have paid out $3.3 billion to New Jersey homeowners so far, FEMA reported earlier this month. Of the more than 73,000 claims filed, 97 percent have been closed, the agency said.

With Memorial Day looming on the horizon, the reconstruction of boardwalks, beach clubs and many other businesses dependent on the summer tourist trade is progressing at a feverish pace. But the housing picture remains muddled.

Across New Jersey, 346,000 housing units were damaged or destroyed by the storm. The Jersey Shore bore the brunt of the destruction. More than 8,000 homes in Monmouth County and more than 23,000 homes in Ocean County sustained major or severe damage, according to the state Department of Community Affairs.

Many of those displaced by less substantial damage have returned home. Statewide, fewer than 100 people remain in FEMA’s transitional housing program, down from more than 2,000 at the height of the housing crisis.

Barbara DeJessa’s and her disabled 12-year-old daughter, Helena Gross, moved four times in four months, staying in the homes of two different friends and then a pair of hotels before they finally made it back to their rehabilitated rental home in the Shore Acres section of Brick on March 1.

Their first week back, their lagoon-front neighborhood was hit with unusually heavy flooding that an evacuation, an experience that further frayed DeJessa’s already jangled nerves.

(Page 3 of 4)

“I was pretty much over the edge, hanging on a limb,” she said. “But then the flooding subsided, and I started working on the house, and the house looks fantastic. It's so quiet and peaceful.”

Parts of the Shore that were all but abandoned after the storm are slowly coming back to life.

Theresa and Jim Azaceta’s Rumson neighborhood is a buzz of activity. Construction vans clog many streets, and on almost every block, it seems, houses have begun shooting skyward like spring peas.

A crew from Pennsylvania-based Wolfe House & Building Movers hoisted the Azacetas’ 3,000-square-foot Victorian eight feet last week. A FEMA grant will cover the $28,600 cost, they said. Jim Azaceta, a retired firefighter with a wealth of building skills, plans to do the foundation and interior work, saving tens of thousands of dollars.

The couple believes it may be another eight months before they can move with their 7-year-old daughter out of the Atlantic Highlands apartment they’ve been staying in. But as they watched the house inching upward, they could feel some of the strain lifting off their shoulders.

“You start to see the light at the end of the tunnel,” Theresa Azaceta said. “You walk around the neighborhood, you see other houses that are up, you see the foundations going up. When you see you’re at that point ... you know that it’s coming. You’ll be in soon.”

Far from home

But the Azacetas and their neighbors are ahead of the curve.

“We’re in the beginning of the recovery; tons of people have to get back to their houses yet,” said Timothy C. Hearne Jr., treasurer of the Monmouth County Long-Term Recovery Group, a network of nonprofit groups that is coordinating countywide relief efforts.

Linda Gyimoty, treasurer of the Ocean County Long-Term Recovery Group, said the organization estimates that there are some 30,000 people in the county with unmet recovery needs.

(Page 4 of 4)

“That’s a lot of people who are sad, angry and hurting, and need our help,” she said. Both county groups are still in the process of hiring case managers and other staff to handle aid requests.

Along Ocean County’s northern barrier island, parts of Bay Head, Mantoloking, Brick and Toms River look much as they did the day after Sandy.

“It looks as though Hurricane Sandy happened last weekend,” observed Kathy Romanelli, whose summer home in Lavallette was heavily damaged in the storm. She believes a lack of assistance for second-home owners is partly to blame.

Across the river from Rumson in Sea Bright, rebuilt private beach clubs are rising fast, but only a handful of downtown businesses have reopened and an overnight curfew is still in effect for residential side streets.

On April 11, the sign outside the Sea Bright United Methodist Church advertised a “Community Service of Lament & Healing” scheduled for that evening, a testament to the difficulties that many in the borough are having rebounding, on all levels.

“With any type of tragedy, you either get better or you get bitter; you either rise to the occasion, or you shrink away from it,” said the pastor, the Rev. Michael Turner.

“That's the whole idea tonight,” Turner said of the interfaith service. “Hopefully, with the shared experiences of hope, and faith, we can encourage each other."

Andrea Kassimatis and fiance Mike Aponte need all the encouragement they can get.

The cost of removing the oil and elevating or completely rebuilding their home would be several times the $76,000 the couple’s insurer has paid for repairs.

The couple also lost both their vehicles. Aponte, a welder, also had trouble getting to work and wound up losing his job, though he found a new one in December.

The couple still has to make monthly mortgage payments on their home.

To judge fromtrailers scattered through town — there are three others on their street alone — there are plenty of other people who can relate to what they’re going through. More than 500 homes in Union Beach sustained major or severe damage.

“The worst thing is looking out the window of the trailer and staring at a house that we can't even be in, a house we worked so hard to get into,” Kassimatis said.

Her boys have been fabulous, she said. Neither uttered a word of complaint when asked about their cramped living conditions and the ruined home that isn’t safe for them to enter.

“It’s nice that we get to share a room together, I’m enjoying being with him,” said Collin’s brother, Ethan Bennett, who, despite being uprooted from his storm-damaged school, has managed to earn high honors at his temporary school in neighboring Keyport.

The boys’ parents have tried to look on the bright side, too. At least they’re back home, in a manner of speaking, with a roof over their heads, they say. But they admit that the novelty of living in a trailer wore off long ago.

“I try to be positive, I try to be calm about it, but it gets frustrating, you know?” Kassimatis said. “It’s taking a toll on all of us.”